The Scarlet Letter, first published in 1850,
traces the effects of one sin on the lives of
four people in the town of Boston: the
young passionate Hester Prynne who is
forced to publish her shame to the
community by wearing on her breast the
letter A for adultery; her lover, the
cowardly Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale;
her vengeful, aging husband, Roger
Chillingworth and her illegitimate
daughter, the quixotic little Pearl.

Nathaniel Hawthorne himself described
the novel as a ‘hell-fire story’ of shame
and redemption. It displays his lifelong
preoccupation with the themes of secrecy
and guilt, the conflict between the laws of
nature and those of man. As an
illustration of the effects of Calvinistic
Puritanism on life in mid-seventeenth
century New England it has no equal.

The characters are, at the same time,
both palpably real and the embodiment
of moral traits while the powerful
narrative and rich imagery evoke the stark lifestyle of Boston’s Puritans as well as the
surrounding wilderness that played an
important part in shaping the American
psyche. The strenuous, joyless effort to
fashion a Utopian world by eliminating
the unorthodox is evident here in a
society, full of self-righteousness, where
witches and witch-hunting abound.

The novel’s language is rich and lyrical
with rolling, biblical cadences while, in
contrast to the rhetoric, Hawthorne also
gives us simple, vivid descriptions of a
community’s everyday life: the festivals,
the variety of people, the Indians, the
sailors, the ships in the harbour, the
deaths of the respected and the concerns
of young maidens.

The story itself is extraordinary and
shocking. It tells of a spirited woman who
becomes ‘fallen’ in the eyes of the strict
community to which she belongs. Though
the eponymous letter itself is intended as
the badge of adultery, it takes on other
significances—particularly for Pearl—as the novel develops. Melodramatic but
never superficial, The Scarlet Letter
explores one woman’s certainty of what is
right, of her dignity and finally her
triumph over prejudice, hypocrisy and
fear. Perhaps above all, it asks what sort
of society could ever decree by law that a
woman should be branded an outcast
and compelled to live outside it.